Tuesday, September 30, 2008

At BoingBoing today, Douglas Rushkoff passes along the link to an article he did this past spring for Arthur magazine titled "Riding out the Credit Collapse." As he writes on BoingBoing, this is "a way to review the steps that led to our current fiasco, explain it in the greater context of centralized currency, and help people not feel so very terrible about it all."

...Bush’s tax cuts and other measures favoring the rich led to the biggest redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in American history. The result was that the wealthy—the investment class—had more money to invest, or lend, than there were people and businesses looking to borrow.The easiest way to bring more borrowers into the system—and to create more of a market for money—was to promote homeownership in America. This is precisely what the Bush administration did, touting home ownership as an American right. Of course, they weren’t talking about home ownership at all, but rather pushing people to borrow money tied to the value of a house. If people could be persuaded to take mortgages on homes, real estate values would go up for those already invested (like land trusts and real estate funds) and banks would have a market for the excess money they had accumulated.In short, there was a surplus of credit in the system. Americans were encouraged to borrow in the form of mortgages, which created demand for the credit banks wanted to sell. In many cases the credit itself wasn’t even real, but leveraged off some other inflated commodity that the bank or investor may have owned.

The 66-year-old rocker was born in Brooklyn and has spent all of his life living in Manhattan, where he was once nicknamed the Bard of the East Village. Reed is fiercely proud of the city, and hopes a future mayor will recognise him - in the same way punk star Joey Ramone was honoured when the 2nd Street East Village block where he once lived was officially renamed Joey Ramone Place. Reed says, "Lou Reed Way would be nice. Any little street would do."

And the winner? 10011 in Chelsea. Woo-hoo! Nice going! (Uh, so to speak.) And in the 10009 zip code of the East Village? Just one! Hmm.

According to the post:

Admittedly, information about where we pee illegally may be subject to reporting bias: residents of tony Gramercy, for instance, may be quicker to complain to 311 than those in the neighboring (and more transient) Lower East Side, which may explain some of the difference captured in the DoITT's reports. Indeed, neighborhoods that rank the highest in complaints may even try to claim superior citizenly virtue, for being so quick to notify the city of their misbehaving brethren. This isn't the last word in the Great Manhattan Inter-Neighborhood Piss-off. But until then, let's let the numbers tell their own story.

Here's a photo of a locked box for members at the New York Sports Club on Wall Street across the street from the New York Stock Exchange. As the photo below sent by a tipster shows, the occupant of this particular box couldn't be bothered with collecting the pennies that were left behind.

This just makes me sick. The Emerald Inn on Columbus Avenue (near 69th Street) will be closing next spring. Rent for the bar, which opened in 1943, "is more than doubling" to $350,000 a year "for the cozy, 800-square-foot saloon."

And get this: Owner Charlie Campbell, whose grandfather opening the place when FDR was in office, "got the bad news when he saw the location advertised for lease on the Web site of real estate brokerage CB Richard Ellis."

Among them yesterday was Michael Morfit, 46, a partner in Lighthouse Financial, who said he comes in twice a week.

"We used to have all these ma-and-pa shops," Morfit lamented over a couple of Buds. "Now all you have is big companies like Circuit City and Best Buy, because smaller companies can't afford the rents."

Well, I'll spare you from yammering away about how much I like the Emerald Inn. It's expected to close in May. Go and enjoy while you can... and stop by the P&G while you're at it.

Margot Gayle, who marshaled shrewdness, gentility and spunk to save the Victorian cast-iron buildings of New York — using a little magnet as a demonstration device — in a crusade that led to the preservation of historic SoHo, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 100. (New York Times)

Monday, September 29, 2008

The state labor department expects Wall Street to lose 40,000 jobs, perhaps permanently, which means the city's service industry could lose another 80,000 workers, in fields ranging from retail shops to law firms.

Lower Manhattan's future could rest on residential development, which has seen its population double to about 57,000 since 2001, as a older, obsolete office buildings were converted into trendy apartments for Wall Street whiz kids, said Mitchell Moss, professor of Urban Policy and Planning and director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University.

"That's going to turn out to be one of the great ironies that the residential development is going to create the demand for office space," Moss said, "because people enjoy working near where they live."

But financial sector job losses could drive down prices for apartments 20 percent to 25 percent, more than the rest of the city, said Bill Staniford, chief executive of real estate data web site PropertyShark.com.

"The buildings that have gone after this young hot Wall Street crowd will be the most vulnerable," said Pamela Liebman, chief executive at The Corcoran Group, which specializes in luxury homes in the metropolitan area.

"Finance is one of the more dominant buyer profiles that you'll see, so obviously it's a concern," said Angela Ferrara, a vice president of sales for The Marketing Directors, sales agent for The Setai, a luxury building at 40 Broad Street.

The week after Lehman Brothers failed, brokerage Cooper & Cooper received several calls from clients who needed to break their lease or could not take a new apartment, according to the brokerage's Vice President Jed Cohen.

So far, there has been a tasteless suggestion of the World Trade Center...all of Third Avenue in Manhattan...and the "astonishingly ugly Blue building on the Lower East Side. Who in their sane minds could have put up something as hideous as that."

For instance, here's Jay McInerney in an essay he wrote titled "Yuppies in Eden"....He says he first heard the term "yuppie" in 1983 while having breakfast at Veselka. A painter he knew muttered "fucking yuppies" after seeing an Upper East Side-looking couple in chinos.

Not long after my first actual sighting, I would see the earliest DIE YUPPIE SCUM graffiti around the neighborhood, an epithet that was soon vying in popularity with that LES perennial EAT THE RICH. The vituperative tone with which the Y-word was pronounced on East Fifth Street was in part a function of rapidly escalating real-estate prices in the East Village; after decades of relative stability that had made the area a bastion of Eastern European immigrants and young bohemians, though, it’s easy to forget at this distance that it was also a war zone where muggings and rapes weren’t considered news. The Hells Angels ruled East Third Street, and after dark you went east of Second Avenue strictly at your own risk. The cops didn’t go there. East Tenth beyond Avenue A was a narcotics supermarket where preteen runners scampered in and out of bombed-out tenements. In fact, great swatches of the city were dirty and crime-ridden. Even the West Village was pretty gritty by today’s standards, and Times Square was a scene of spectacular squalor. Check out Taxi Driver or The French Connection if you want to get a sense of what this urban wasteland looked like.

And later...

My first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, came out in September 1984, although it was set a few years earlier, in a grubbier, less prosperous New York. No one was more surprised than me when The Wall Street Journal described me as a spokesman for the yuppies. The protagonist of the novel was a downwardly mobile fact-checker and aspiring novelist, and unless I’m mistaken, he didn’t eat any raw fish in the novel. His best friend, Tad Allagash, was a likelier yuppie, an adman with entrée to all the right places, an uptown boy who knew his way around downtown. And they both did a lot of coke, a.k.a. Bolivian Marching Powder, which was to become the emblematic drug of the eighties, what acid had been to the sixties.

Once a year, I go directly to the lingerie department at Bloomingdale's and I try on bras and panties. Then I gather each piece in four colors and buy 24 of each set. I send 24 to my home in Palm Beach, 24 to Saint-Tropez, 24 to London and 24 to New York.

Rhyme & Reason, the card shop on 14th Street and Irving Place, is now officially closed. As Racked noted, the owner was facing a huge rent hike for this corner spot in the Zeckendorf Towers. What's to come? I have no idea! But it's a prime spot in NYUville. Also! There's a Duane Reade a block away on 14th and Third...and a Walgreens across the street. So this seems like a good spot for a drug store. Rite Aid?

Anyway, I figured something was up last month when the Christmas items went on sale...

If you watched five minutes of tv in the New York metropolitan area over the past year, you saw this commercial twice. The New York Times must have spent the annual budgets of several Third World nations on this media buy. There has to be a term ad agencies use for a campaign like this that achieves such market oversaturation that it begins to have the opposite of the intended effect and only makes people hate the product. Relentless, remorseless, ubiquitous, inescapable–you couldn’t channel-surf fast enough to get away from it; often it is running on multiple channels at once. "Hi, I’d like to start–" Click. "–ting home delivery of–" Click. "–our financial sec–" Aaaiiieee!

Not only ubiquitous, it’s repulsive. The characters, whom we correctly identified some weeks ago a "rainbow coalition of hideous yuppies," are so carefully chosen for a p.c. spread–young, old, Asian, WASP, brown, male, female–and yet all cut an unmistakable figure of complacent upper-middle-class suburban domesticity. Notice they all seem to have big houses and sun-filled rooms, not a dim little Upper West Side rent-stabilized apartment-dweller in the lot. Clearly this is an ad pitched at the suburban LI-NJ-CT-Westchester-Rockland market. So why must the rest of us suffer through it? Don’t they have a way to narrowcast it only to those markets and leave the rest of us alone?

But back to that rainbow coalition. We got to know these people this year as intimately as our most hated neighbors. The Filipino-looking pederast who simpers, "First thing? I think about my family here–and in my homeland." Nice kneejerk liberal save-the-world touch, the way he overarticulates that word home-land, like he’s auditioning for a community theater production of The King and I. ("King is king of all people–here and in my home-land! Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.") The gender-stereotyping throughout the ad is also remarkably blatant: Man Breadwinner, interested in the business section; Woman Breeder, loves the crossword puzzle. Thus the presumably gay actor playing the empty suit droning about "our financial security" while his brainless Stepford wife literally leans on his elbow and gazes insipidly into middle distance, dreaming of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls and making babies. There’s the old WASP lady who cherishes "another day to learn something new..." ("...that I’ll forget in five minutes because I have Alzheimer’s. The paperboy has actually been delivering the same issue of the paper every day since 1996 and I haven’t noticed!") The positively scary woman with OCD who must finish the crossword puzzle. And the mocha hottie who just loves the arts and "nothing satisfies my passion like The New York Times." Nice subliminal messaging there. Very subtle.

Two or three times during the ad, one of these noids will look directly at you through the lens and repeat in their best, slow, hypnotist’s repeat-after-me voice, "I’d like...to start getting...home delivery...of...The...New York Times..." The ad ran so often, in so many places, that the message became Pavlovian through sheer, heartless repetition. Pretty soon you were shambling the streets of the city like a George Romero zombie, hollow-eyed, unkempt, muttering, "must...order...home delivery...of...The...New York Times...must...order..."

Condescending and yet browbeating, like the Times itself, this commercial was like an unwelcomed guest on our tv screen who just wouldn’t go away. People complained about the Taco Bell dog and the Pets.com sock puppet (the latter our favorite tv figure of the year, and when does he get to host his own talk show?), but both those campaigns combined didn’t add up to the sheer volume or aggravation of this single Times commercial.

I could not find the commercial on YouTube. But here's a parody of it...

Thrillist has the following item today on Ella, the piano bar at 9 Ave. A that opens Thursday:

From the Gallery Bar guys, Ella's a semi-private, bi-level, black-lacquered and mirror-bedecked lounge that aims to provide classy ivory tickling from both accomplished house acts and the occasional signed artist (read: people no longer offering music lessons). The intimate, b&w-tiled downstairs sports a jet-black upright Yamaha, a small stage for jazz/blues/torch singers, and a DJ booth, all under a multi-colored lit ceiling evocative of Willy Wonka's terrifying psychedelic tunnel. For a break from the crooning, walk up to the chandeliered, Tinseltown-chic bar & lounge: floral-print couches and semi-circular red suede banquettes fresh from the '07 Oscars flanking a 15-seat bar, which slings speciality cocktails inspired by post-WWII cinema, e.g., the vodka & muddled grape Daisy Kenyon, and the ginny Mildred Pierce ("if you loved Working Girl...").

Ella's opening Thursday, reservations are referral only, and the door policy is doorman's discretion -- so there's a decent chance you'll be stranded outside with Paul and Davy, who's still in the Navy, and probably still hasn't finished The Duplex Supremacy.

The Timeslooks at the possible development of Extra Place. As you know, Avalon Bay wants to pave it and add boutiques and wine bars and stuff. Others argue that it remain a public space. And kind of like it was.

“The ground was magnificent,” said Danny Fields, the manager of the Ramones, who took the photograph in November 1976. “It was filled with junk, shreds of clothes and pieces of barrels, posters, leaves, ropes.”

The Timeshas a great story today about two women who saved their home from destruction at 27 Cooper Square to make way for Cooper Square Hotel. We hear from 74-year-old Hettie Jones and her garden:

“I grew the most fantastic tomatoes and peppers up there, veggies that need lots of light,” lamented Ms. Jones. “We used to have views from every angle, but now they only exist from the hotel’s penthouse.”

She has lived here since 1962.

Pointing to the cluster of new luxury towers rising in the square, Ms. Jones added with a sigh: “This used to be an area where people got their start. Now it’s a place to land once you’ve made it.”

So here’s what I propose. True, the city is close to broke. But even with Wall Street types contemplating the end and construction of new luxury towers grinding to a halt, why give in to despair? Instead of crying over what can’t be built, why not refocus our energies on knocking down the structures that not only fail to bring us joy, but actually bring us down?

Ugliness, of course, should not be the only criterion. There are countless dreadful buildings in New York; only a few (thankfully) have a traumatic effect on the city.

Among the buildings that he suggests tearing down: That ugly curved glass residential building at Astor Place designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates:

[T]he crude quality of its execution is an insult . . . Gwathmey’s tower is squat and clumsy. Clad in garish green glass, it rests on a banal glass box that houses — what else? — rows of A.T.M.’s inside a Chase bank.

But lack of taste is not the point here. Neighborhoods are fragile ecosystems. And while enlightened designs can challenge the past, that is not the same as being oblivious to it. Astor Place would seem more comfortable in a suburban office park.

The East Village is saturated with memories of youthful rebellion. In recent years it has emerged as a crossroads between the world of would-be punks, awkward students and rich Wall Street types. The Gwathmey building serves only the last camp: it’s a literal manifestation of money smoothing over the texture of everyday life.

On a Saturday night, the Lower East Side might as well be Meatpacking District Lite. Overpriced drinks? Check. Annoying restaurants? Check. And don't even get us started on the people.Lower East Side Sunday afternoons are a different thing altogether. Because while the neighborhood is host to one of the more obnoxious night-life scenes, there's also another scene that's cropped up, and it's a cool one.The 'hood has one of the most vibrant art scenes in town: 35 galleries, lots of them run by young, hot dealers. It also boasts a brand-new museum called, fittingly, the New Museum.

This was the caption to the photo (not the one that I'm using) that accompanied the article:

No red velvet ropes here! On a Sunday afternoon, art enthusiasts can chow down on doughnuts and stroll around the nabe without glimpsing any B&T barflies (They took the train home to Syosset last night).

Here's one small bit of payback that angry and frustrated New Yorkers could easily bestow on the grasping financial merchants behind last week's meltdown: Have the City Council — always down for a good street renaming — simply re-tag Wall Street with a new label, one more in line with its recent history: Boulevard of Greed? Gluttony Gulch? Chozzer Terrace?

For those of us prone to take the low road, these are the sort of names that instantly spring to mind, the nastier the better. And why not? How else to describe an industry that applauds nearly $500 million in bonuses for executives recklessly steering straight into the fiscal rocks, taking an entire economy down with them?

StreetWars was created in 2004 by Franz Aliquo, then a 28-year-old securities lawyer, as a cure for a boredom phase he was working through. Mr. Aliquo named himself Supreme Commander and, with a friend known as Mustache Commander and other helpers, has held several killing tournaments in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London and Paris. The game resembles the 1980s campus phenomenon Assassin, itself a reminder of the 1985 film “Gotcha!” starring Anthony Edwards and his paintball gun.

The contestants are mostly in their 20s or early 30s, from what could be called the kickball set; about 35 percent in the current war are women.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Bronx native August Darnell claims to have had a vision of the band he fronted -- Kid Creole and the Coconuts -- in a nightmare while walking down Fifth Avenue. (Must have been in August...) His Kid Creole persona was inspired by Cab Calloway. Here's 1985's "Endicott," a toe-tapper for these tough times.

In May, I wrote a post aboutWild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, the debut feature from Brooklyn-based filmmaker Matt Wolf. Russell, who died of AIDS in 1992 at age 40, was an East Village resident who "bridged the gap between the artistic vanguard and dancefloor hits, The Kitchen and Studio 54." The film starts tonight at the IFC.

What do you think of the New York music scene now, as compared to back then?

I think New York is more of a hub these days then a laboratory and breeding ground for experimentation. Musicians and artists seem to pass through to perform and to hang out briefly, but they work and go into hibernation elsewhere. That’s probably because New York has become such an economically straining and competitive environment. It’s hard to be free to experiment and play in this city.

From The Villager: "The Landmarks Preservation Commission last week designated as city landmarks two East Village buildings dating from the 1920s, the Wheatsworth Bakery, now a storage warehouse on E. 10th St., and the Public National Bank, now a residential building on Avenue C (pictured right)."

Since last Thursday, there have been 200 price cuts on properties listed at less than $10 million on Manhattan's Upper East Side or Upper West Side -- a 17% jump from the week before. Deanna Kory, a broker with New York-based Corcoran Group who's handling nearly two-dozen properties priced between $2 million and $10 million, says her showings are down by about 40% in the last two weeks compared to the same time last year. A slew of new buildings set to open in the next year will only increase supply. (Wall Street Journal)

So, how was your week? As I've written before, I work in the Financial District, though my job has nothing to do with financials (or districts). Or Wall Street. Anyway, as you read here exclusively last week, things aren't going so well on Wall Street. But seriously, this past week was -- for a lack of a better word -- interesting. I noticed this giddy undercurrent while walking around. Especially among the tourists, who sensed they were witnessing history. And there was no shortage of activity, which is documented in subsequent posts.On Monday, a small group (uh, four) of Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty volunteers took to the steps of Federal Hall to voice displeasure over the Fed's bajillion dollar bailout proposal.

[For the record, that is NOT my thumb with the dirty nail...]

Also! Reporters and various rubberneckers stood outside the Federal Reserve on Maiden Lane to look at some well-dressed white people in suits. They were waiting to see Hillary Clinton.

And I think we all know why there was such commotion at the Fed...the missing gold!

Members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) held a small demonstration at the side of the Chase Plaza on Liberty Street late in the morning. They ask that Congress protect homeowners facing foreclosures (paraphrasing here) instead of the Wall Street fatcats who got us into this mess.

VIPs are rushed to the entrance of the NYSE. A pack of photographers wait. Tourists get as close to the action as they can. Cops and Secret Servicey-looking people stand guard. Bomb-sniffing dogs whip into a frenzy. Who is it? Brad and Angelina?! (Oh, God -- please let it be! And who started this rumor in front of so many tourists? Heh.) It's, it's...

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Here, you'll find things that you may or may not be interested in about the East Village and other parts of New York City. Appreciating what's here while it's still here. Remembering what's no longer here. Wishing some things weren't here that are here.